Don't Need the Feather
by UnabashedBird
Summary: Sam kills the demon and saves his friend, because demons don't always lie.


A/N: Written in response to a prompt from themegalosaurus on Tumblr. (Check her out, she's AWESOME.)

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><p>Sam closed his eyes, took a deep breath, gathering himself to a focused point while Dean finished the salt line. He was about to be one step closer to finishing this. To having justice and closure. He was going to kill this demon.<p>

Just not with the knife.

_You don't need the feather to fly_, she'd said. And yeah, demons lie, but he'd wondered. For months, he was too busy regaining Dean's trust and fighting the urge to power up with blood to even consider testing it out. But after Famine, after he'd learned that, even though he failed, he was capable of resisting even as the power coursed through his veins, he'd began to try. Small things, so Dean wouldn't notice: pushing on demons as they were exorcised to make them leave the host faster, mentally shoving them so they were just a little slower in a fight, things like that.

And it worked. It was _hard_, harder than it had ever been when he was drinking the blood, but _he could do it_. And if he could do it without drinking demon blood, well, didn't that mean that it wasn't entirely demonic? That some of it came from him? Sure, he was tainted beyond repair by those drops Azazel fed him and by the things he had done, but if his taint could save people without extra juice, wasn't that almost redemption? Or at least an apology to the world for sullying it with his presence?

The last time they exorcised a demon, unbeknownst to Dean, almost the whole thing had been Sam's mojo, not the Latin. He wouldn't be able to hide what he was about to attempt from Dean, and there was a good chance his brother wouldn't believe that he'd had no blood, but he had to try anyway.

Because it was Brady. No, not Brady: he'd asked to be called by his surname just before Christmas their sophomore year, after he was possessed, Sam now knew. Because it was Ty, his roommate and best friend. Ty, who loved independent movies and cerebral non-plots but had still come with him to the midnight showing of _Two Towers_. Ty, with whom he'd gotten into friendly shouting matches over the merits of everything from Jane Austen to Dan Brown. Ty, who one night after a few beers confessed to feeling like a freak because sex and romance had never been things he'd been interested in, and had listened to Sam's fears about rejection and out-of-placeness because his family didn't want him since he didn't want to carry on the family business; they had fallen asleep with their heads on each others' shoulders and found that their mutual worry that their friendship couldn't survive the night's intimacies was baseless.

The demon sneered at him through Ty's face. Dean was saying something.

"All those angels, all those demons, all those sons of bitches, they just don't get it, do they, Sammy?"

"No they don't, Dean."

"You see, Brady, we're the ones you should be afraid of."

Time.

The demon is saying something, but he's not listening. He needs to focus.

Exorcizing the last demon, about a week ago, had taken a lot out of him, and he knew killing would be harder. But he also had a theory about where the power came from when he wasn't drinking blood. A ridiculous, counter-intuitive theory that he knew he'd have to try.

So he used his body to pin the demon against the wall of the alley, and he reached deep inside himself.

Reached for love. Reached for every good memory he had with Ty, who had been possessed and was probably long dead, but this was his body, and it deserved to be at peace. Reached for hikes and Ultimate Frisbee and innocent acts of college male stupidity and 2 a.m. conversations about everything and nothing.

Sam could feel the power building, start to see little flickers of light coming from the demon, but he knew it wasn't enough yet.

So he reached for Jess, too, Jess who this demon had used his friend's body to kill. Jess who had been sweet and kind but also fierce in a way he'd never encountered before. Jess who knew more about art than anyone he'd ever met, who was going to run her own gallery some day. Jess who made the best cookies in the whole damn universe, and joked that the only reason she exercised so much was so she could eat her own baking. Jess who had been just as excited as he was about the midnight release of _Return of the King_, and agreed with him about Faramir's importance. Jess who had, miraculously, loved him, and let him love her back.

Dean was saying something behind him. Any moment now Dean would realize that the flickering light coming from the demon wasn't because Sam was hurting it with the knife before dealing the death blow, and then Dean would try to stop him. It was now or never.

Sam gathered up all the love and happiness he'd had at Stanford, as Ty's friend and Jess' boyfriend, and channeled his power _through_ it in righteous anger and thirst for justice. He circled the power around the demon, and only the demon, he would not hurt Ty's body again, and he squeezed.

The demon's light flashed like lightening, flickered, and died, and Ty's body slumped forward against Sam.

Except it wasn't a body, because _Ty was breathing_. He was unconscious, but he was breathing. He was alive.

And then Dean was there, and Sam could feel the anger and confusion rolling off him in waves, but when he realized Ty was alive he helped Sam get him to the Impala. But, miracle of miracles, Dean believed him when he told him he didn't drink, when he explained about what he'd been trying. Dean admitted that he still didn't like it, still wasn't at all sure it was good or right, but hey, a dead demon and a live human was a definite upside. Dean told him, affectionately, to shut up when Sam asked him who he was and what he'd done with his brother.

They took Ty to a hospital, and Sam got everything squred away with payment and gave them his and Bobby's contact information for if Ty woke up. He didn't know whether to hope that it was before or after . . . what was to come.

. . .

Ty wakes up a couple of weeks later. Unbeknownst to him, he'd slept through the apocalypse. Or rather, slept through what was supposed to be the apocalypse. He felt dazed and confused, his mind full of things he didn't understand and could hardly stand to think about. _He needed to talk to Sam_.

Instead, a gruff middle-aged man with a drawl and too much sadness in his eyes shows up. He introduces himself as Bobby Singer, a friend of Sam Winchester, and they have a brief conversation about demon possession and the fact that yes, it really is the year 2010. Then he gives Ty a letter.

It's Sam's handwriting.

_Hey Ty,_

_I honestly don't know whether to hope that you'll read this or not. If you do, then you didn't wake up until after we pulled stopping the fucking apocalypse out of our asses (Bobby will fill you in on the details about all that), and for all intents and purposes, I'm dead. So we didn't get to talk again, and that's too bad, because I've missed you, man._

_On the other hand, if you don't see this, it means that either you woke up before the big fight, which means maybe you woke up just in time for the world to end, or else you didn't wake up at all. But I guess there's not really any point in me mentioning all that, because you're reading this. See, look at what an ass I've become without you around to force me to think through what I'm saying._

_I can't fit everything I wish I could say to you into one letter, so I'll just hit the highlights. I don't know how much you remember about what the demon did while you were possessed but I want you to know that __none__ of it is your fault. That won't stop you from having nightmares and feeling guilty (believe me, I know), but I want to make sure you know that I don't hold you responsible for any of it. If it's anyone's fault, it's mine. I should have realized you were possessed, I should have saved you years ago, and I'm so sorry that I didn't. I hope you can forgive me. In a small attempt to make it up to you, I've included a picture of an anti-possession symbol. Get it as a tattoo and demons won't be able to get in. It's too little too late, but hopefully it'll give you one less thing to worry about._

_But like I said, cliché as it is, if you're reading this, I'm dead, so I also want to make sure you know that you were the best friend I ever had, and my life was so much better because you were in it for a while. So thank you. Thank you so much._

_And now, even though I know I've got no right to, I'm going to ask you for a favor. It's a goddamn miracle that you're alive, Ty: most possessed people burn out within a few months, and I'm kinda pissed that I don't get to know how you lasted for over six years. So I'm asking you not to waste your miracle. If you still want to be a doctor, go back to school and kick ass. Or go back to school and kick ass at something else. Just . . . just, live, OK Ty? Please just live a good life, a life that you find happy and fulfilling. Find friends who won't give you shit about not dating, go see every fucking pretentious movie ever made and annoy the shit out of people with your opinions about them. Travel around the world like you always talked about. It's why I did what I did, you know: so people like you could __live__._

_I guess I've rambled on enough to give you plenty of material for mocking what a sap I am. Give a dead man a little leeway, won't you?_

_But seriously, man, I'm sorry I wasn't there for you before, and I'm sorry I can't be there for you now, and I truly, sincerely hope that you go out and have the best life that you can._

_Your friend,_

_Sam_

There are tears in Ty's eyes. Fucking Sam Winchester.

"Yeah, sounds about right," Bobby says. Ty must've said that out loud.

. . .

Bobby fills him in on everything he needs to know from the past six-and-a-half years (the theory is that he survived because he retreated so far into himself and went to sleep, and the demon couldn't be bothered to drag him out and burn him up when he wasn't causing it any trouble anyway), gets him set up with a new identity and a cover story. Sam was right about the nightmares and the guilt (_Jessica_, his hands killed _Jessica_ and his mouth laughed while his eyes watched Sam be dragged from the apartment screaming her name), but he'll be damned (fuck) if he lets that stop him from trying to do what Sam asked and live.

He goes back to school so he can be a paramedic. It's not what he planned, but it's medical and it's helping people and by all accounts he'll be constantly exhausted and a macabre sense of humor will be normal and those sound like very appealing coping mechanisms.

His apartment is full of strategically placed jugs of salty holy water and there are devil's traps under all the doormats, but it's also full of books and DVDs of pretentious movies and a record player and a growing collection of vinyl. Occasionally it contains new friends who also appreciate those things.

Ty never saw the tall figure in the shadows, checking to make sure he was doing OK and getting on with things before disappearing from his life forever.


End file.
